A bit about pharmacies in the USA. Mainly prescription drugs, prescribed by a doctor. The doctor sends the prescription electronically to your pharmacy, and you just go there and redeem it by showing your ID. I periodically get a cough, almost every year, and I just in case do an X-ray and see a doctor. Thank God, it’s all clear, but the doctor prescribes some medications because something needs to be prescribed. Thankfully, not antibiotics – that’s generally the first thing they do. This time the doctor prescribed a mouth spray, which turned out to be expensive at the pharmacy ($320, Budesonide/Formoterol). It could have been ignored if it had been approved by insurance, but it wasn’t, and I was asked to pay out of pocket. When I asked the doctor to prescribe something else, he prescribed the same budesonide/formoterol, but in some other form, and although the spray again cost over $300, this time the insurance paid two-thirds. I paid $100, which was unpleasant to do, but I decided to try it.
You can also just buy in the pharmacy. In the cough section, there are about 40 different medicines. But they all are a combination of guaifenesin (secretolytic, expectorant; also known as a substance to keep horses under anesthesia 😉) and dextromethorphan, which is essentially not a medicine but a symptom-removing agent (effectively, a cough center blocker in the brain). And that’s it, nothing more. A huge stand only of bottles and pills, where one of these two active substances is presented alone or both in various proportions. Everything else — only through a doctor.
In Russia, for example, Bromhexine (expectorant) is popular. In the US, it has no FDA approval. The FDA also did not approve Ambroxol. I tried to find acetylcysteine, it’s a mucolytic too. And there’s a problem — it was only available as “vitamins,” but now even that is not available (
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 